Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

The longer I edit blog posts for OpenShift.com and the more I read about tight writing and good content the more I see patterns of sentences that could be stronger.

Recently saw the word “can” and it went something like, “By running the Super Duper Big Hulabalooper you can make your business more efficient.”

I think can makes this setence weaker than it needs to be. It comes across like, “it might” or “it ‘can’ but then again it might not.” Who wants something like that?

Every time I see a sentence starting with “By” I know it’s going to be a weak sentence. Don’t save the punch or the benefit for the end, give it to people right away. Here’s how I would make these lead stronger.

Make your business efficient with the Super Duper Big Hulabalooper. (10 words)

Before: By running the Super Duper Big Hulabalooper you can make your business more efficient. (14 words)

Another consideration is modifiers. In this case, how great is the difference between “more efficient” and “efficient?” Or maybe there is a single word that could replace the idea of “being more efficient?”

A more obivious example could be, “He was trying very frantically not to miss his plane.” What’s the difference between “frantic” and “very frantic?” Not very much.

This could be tightened to be: “He sprinted to the gate, almost knocking me over.”

Look how many words I chopped out and look how it gets to the point.

Some people think writing is tedioius and boring. It’s a constant puzzle I enjoy solving because it makes things clearer. I love making things clearer. It’s just the way I’m wired.

John Poelstra

2 Comments

By using weaker sentences, you can avoid saying something wrong that will get nitpicked to death on the Internet. Every engineer knows you can’t promise anything ever without any failure of delivering exactly what you said being brought back for the next 40 years as your greatest failure.. if not by everyone else by that little voice in the back of the head that reminds you of every failure you have.

I think 90% of my first drafts are weak because I don’t want to end up over-promising… but not knowing that I am promising failure instead of results. My plan this winter is to do a daily writing exercise of writing Hemingway and Dashiel Hammett paragraphs over and over again. By doing this, I hope I can break this habit that I may have :).